What if I have a product that I want to talk about using a blog, to early private beta testers, and I don’t want other people to be able to read or monitor the blog, so they can’t use the stuff I blog about for their own purposes…

My immediate thought is to create a blog that only people that are logged in can view – there are plugins for WordPress that enable this (or so my Google search earlier told me) – so that I can blog easily enough, and point people to the blog so that they can follow the progress and get involved.

This is what I would call “stealth blogging” and I’m wondering what you think?

You could do it using a simple Apache .htaccess authorisation (where you either give everyone the same user name and password or you create unique logins for everyone); you could do it using the abovementioned plugins, you could also just create a blog that you don’t advertise to anyone online and tell robots not to index; or you could add external handrolled/existing authorisation functionaility which sits outside of the blogging software but requires a login… so there are a few ways to do it.

Can you think of any other ways to do it, which are better or more efficient?

But, the question is more a business/startup one – is there something I’m missing you can think of, to suggest it shouldn’t be done? or do you agree in principle? It seems like a good strategy to me, and would certainly solve quite a few other problems… Having early adopters that are actively helping you to develop and test the software because they have an incentive to do so is very useful, perhaps more useful and more important than possible negative issues.

What do you think? – I’d love to hear any other points of view for or against this…